


The Burn that Keeps Everything Awake

by mousemind



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, M/M, Magical Realism, Mentions of past abuse, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-09-03
Packaged: 2018-08-11 22:54:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7910746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mousemind/pseuds/mousemind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the front of his notebook, now completely filled, Richard has written "I nearly died and someone else's life flashed before my eyes" and it feels foolish but utterly, undeniably inarguable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Richard has made a habit of it.

When 3:30 in the morning rolls around, he touches his chest, over his heart. He doesn't feel it beating, hammering away like it could crack ribs like he sometimes feels during the day, hiding out in a storage closet at work. He isn't agitated. But it is a habit, something grounding and expected when, in the strange sharp grey light of not-yet morning, things feel hazy and spun-out.

He often paces the house alone, quietly. Will look out the window and imagine faces in the shadows spilled out on the street. Watch some late-night infomercials and parrot back words that stick out to him, sounding unfamiliar and ugly mumbled out into the quiet.

Richard aches to sleep. Hasn't slept well since arriving in Tulsa, since his parents picked him up at the airport with his arms full of luggage; everything he had in his shitty college dorm room hastily jammed into too few bags. 

He'd often meet his mother in the living room some time past two am, both sprung awake, whirring fast. A bad lifelong misfortune, an unshakeable and unpredictable insomnia. She'd invite him to finish the movie  _du jour_  - always old, often musical - and he'd curl up on the couch beside her, chewing at his fingers. She'd say, how's work. He'd mumble something about BestBuy; awful, mortifying, but still the unspoken understanding that Stanford was worse. Unbearable. Bringing him to the brink of something he has not still fully stepped back from.

His mother's bout of insomnia subsides, as it often does in waves. Richard's does not. 3:30am again. He touches his heart. Stillness. He goes for a glass of water in the kitchen and watches the sun rise.

\-----

"Hendricks! Yeah, of course, man, we went to high school together!"

Richard bobs his head, pushes the items through the scanner and into a bright yellow bag.

"Mm," he assents, not quite looking up. "Yeah."

"You back in town for the summer?"

"Yes," Richard answers. "That'll be 39.99"

What he doesn't say is he arrived in December. In three weeks it will be September. It will be Richard's birthday. He will not return to school, or anywhere else for that matter.

"It's simply incredible," the overbearing spokesman crows on television, later on that night. He wrings out a sponge with a gleeful awe.

"Simply incredible," Richard repeats, muffled by the thumb in his mouth, the fingernail bitten down to the quick. A passing car's high-beams illuminate the far wall for a brief moment and Richard imagines it careening into the living room and wiping him out. He replays that image and feels an odd comfort; lets it lull him into an oddly peaceful sleep - the first in weeks - there on the couch.

\-----

"Was I -- when I was a kid. Was I happy?"

"You had high expectations. Even then."

"But was I happy," he persists.

Richard's mother kisses his temple.

"Of course, sweetheart. Keep the tv on?"

Richard nods, watches her climb the stairs. His eyes flick to the time on the cable box beneath the television set, as if he knows, as if the universe had planned it this way. He lays his hand over his heart.

\-----

A well-meaning co-worker rummages through her purse and pushes a half-full bottle of Restoril into Richard's hand.

"I can't take 'em anymore, not since I got pregnant" she explains. "But they fucking  _work_."

She snaps her gum, then, like an exclamation point on the end of her sentence.

"Get some rest, kiddo."

Her break ends. Richard looks out into the parking lot for some sign. Tomorrow he'll turn twenty three. Tell me I'll be better, he thinks very hard, very willfully. Tell me tomorrow whatever this is will be over. This part where instead of just having trouble staying asleep, he seems to have foregone sleep entirely. This part where he is no longer the genius, the promise, the kid with a future. Tomorrow maybe food will taste good again, and his shoulders won't feel clenched tight, and he'll gain some weight back and quit this job and his parents will drive him back to the airport where he'll fly out west, out where there are good ideas, and he's the one dreaming them all up. Maybe that. Maybe tomorrow.

There are the distant sounds of summer cicadas in the trees across the parking lot. But otherwise, there's nothing but the usual, hollow feeling of time passing. His watch beeps, he returns to his shift.

\-----

"Richie, did you hear me?"

Richard snaps to look up at his sister, suddenly beside him on the couch. He doesn't recall her sitting down. He doesn't recall much after politely picking at his slice of birthday cake at the dinner table, declining a glass of wine from his father.

"Hm?"

"Did you hear what I just asked," she repeats, and her face is all screwed up like Richard's done something wrong. He hopes he hasn't; he isn't quite sure what he's done at all recently.

"Sorry," he replies. "Uh. No."

"Bud," she clucks sort of reproachfully, though not with any sort of anger. She scrubs a hand through his messy hair and looks at him with a scrutinizing sort of fondness, smiling, but not broadly like she usually does. "What's going on with you?"

"I'm just tired," Richard answers, truthfully. It is, he realizes, the first time he has said those words aloud in months. The admission has the unintended side effect of making him feel even more acutely aware of how tired he really feels; like he's never been anything but tired before, like he'll never be anything but tired ever again.

His parents sit side by side on the bench before the piano in the living room, his father playing, his mother singing lightly under her breath. Richard's sister throws one arm around him and jostles him playfully, just a bit.

"Sleep, Richard," she laughs. "Sleep. Whatever brilliant idea you've got rattling around will still be there tomorrow."

There is no brilliant idea, he wants to say. There never has been.

"Happy birthday, Richie," his sister repeats when she says goodbye, and Richard feels an odd sort of finality when he hears her say it, affirmed in the way she wraps her hand around his bicep and squeezes, conspiratorially. Richard thinks, we had a nice goodbye.

When his parents have gone to bed, he takes his co-worker's gifted pills out of the top drawer on his bedside table and turns the bottle over in his hands. He thoroughly rinses out a glass in the bathroom four, five times, until it's very clean and his fingers are cold and wrinkled from being under the water for so long. He takes a pill, and then a second. He isn't tired. Three more. No change.

By the time 3:30 rolls around and Richard dutifully touches his hand over his heart, laying on the floor of the living room and imagining faces in the shadows cast on the walls, he can see the bottom of the bottle, only a few extra pills rattling around.

For good measure, he finishes the rest. To sleep. To make sure he stays asleep.

\-----

_The low drone of a hospital: beeping and the sound of wheels on linoleum and the hum of fluorescent lights. Another more purposeful humming, a woman's voice. You're holding her hand._

_You're signing a paper. You're signing a paper in a sunny office but the woman across from you is saying Donald, Donald, are you alright? and you fall back so heavily into an uncomfortable chair that it makes the teeth rattle in your head. You go to a funeral. You pack up a small room._

_A woman shouts and slaps you hard across your face, and a sound escapes you, weird and animal and embarrassing. Who did you tell, she screeches, and you touch your cheek where it still stings and ache to cry out for your mother. Your uncle sits impassively at the table and watches._

_You tidy your hair in a mirror, you cup water from the faucet and throw it over your face and, when you peek out and see that no one is in the hallways - school not meant to begin for another hour or so - quickly take off your sweater and wash yourself over the sink._

_The warm weather as you move away from the east coast. A new bike. New clothes. Good grades in a good school. A man's large hand, splayed wide and firm between your shoulder blades, pushing you down into the mattress._

_You sign more papers. You sign folders and folders full of papers until the name Donald Dunn looks more like nonsense than anything else. You do this until you go to college. You keep doing this all throughout your time there, and you work hard, and you take jobs, and you find your way to an apartment in Palo Alto. You tidy your hair in a mirror. Hair nicer, mirror nicer. Your own home. What it looks like when you smile back at yourself in a mirror, for once. You are happy, but you are tired._

_You are tired. You are tired. You are tired._

\-----

Richard opens his eyes and his mother tosses the book in her hands onto the floor as she springs to her feet.

"Gary," she calls, turning her head away, "he's up, he's up."

Richard's jaw cracks loudly as he opens his mouth to speak. No sound emerges. His mother helps him upright, adjusting pillows beneath his head and neck, sitting on the edge of the tiny hospital bed. She takes Richard's hands in her own and kisses his knuckles over and over.

A nurse brings water in a plastic cup. His mother takes the glass from her and wipes the rim clean with a napkin before helping Richard drink.

"Mom," he rasps, when his voice returns. She bursts into tears. His father joins them in the room, hovering at his bedside, blocking out the fluorescent lighting that makes Richard's head feel full of glass.

"I'm sorry," Richard says, and she shakes her head and tells him he doesn't need to say anything, he doesn't need to apologize, they're just so happy he's alive. Richard strongly remembers the feeling of a woman's hand being struck across his face.

That isn't me, Richard thinks, looking at his mother weeping beside him, so kind and nervous and soft-spoken for all of Richard's life. That never happened.

He closes his eyes and, like the imprint of an image left on an old television set that'd been switched off, sees the fuzzy name in a foreign handwriting: Donald Dunn.

"Honey," his mother says, noticing Richard's thoughts drifting. "It was an accident."

She kisses his knuckles again, flushed white from how hard he grips his mother's hands.

"It was an accident," she repeats, more pleadingly. Allowing Richard to say what they're all fearful to acknowledge. He shakes his head no, and they both pale considerably, but he does say,

"I love you."

But what he doesn't say, what he wouldn't even begin to know how to say, is he doesn't want to be asleep, to be dead. Not anymore. Because something hot and insistent and wild inside him is shouting, Donald Dunn, Donald Dunn, you have to find Donald Dunn. 

\-----

He leaves the hospital the next day with a new prescription and a spiral notepad filled with everything he can recall about Donald. His notes are hasty, manic, specific.

_Round blue eyes hooded lids tired concerned dark hair parted on the right small voice quiet sort of reedy quality --_

It goes on like this for thousands of words, everything Richard felt and saw and knows, on some deep, unshakeable, cellular level is _true_ and not some hallucination. He catalogues this man's life in quick strokes, but still feels, in some sharp, profound way, all his past hurt in a way that Richard can't capture in words but fears will live inside him for the rest of his life. 

And, too, Richard sleeps.

When he sleeps he revisits flashes of this man, and springs awake in the morning to write down each and every detail. _Cold attic sleeping bag door locked paperback book with the earmarked pages_ \--

He sleeps deeply, undisturbed. Looks forward to the next evening when he can close his eyes again continue to unwrap this mystery. -- _paperback book with the earmarked pages bent spine Island of the Blue Dolphins small duffle bag hidden photos_ \-- 

Richard gains back four pounds in a week. He uses his laptop for the first time in months. He sleeps through the night every night for seven, eight hours, revisiting the same parts of Donald's life over and over as best as he can recall.

"I'm so glad, Richard, I'm so, so glad," his sister says when she visits again, sees Richard awake and alert and participatory again. But all the while Richard wants to explain: You don't understand. If I don't get better I can't find Donald Dunn, and if I don't find Donald Dunn I'll lose my mind.

At the front of his notebook, now completely filled, Richard has written "I nearly died and someone else's life flashed before my eyes" and it feels foolish but utterly, undeniably inarguable.

The dreams fizzle out after a month, and no matter how much he wills his brain to cooperate, he doesn't revisit his vision of Donald's life in his sleep anymore. He turns in his notebook to where the visions ended: Donald buttoning up his top button in the mirror of his small Palo Alto apartment, looping a Hooli nametag around his neck.

So Richard tells a lie that is not quite harmless. 

"If I don't go back to Palo Alto - if I don't see if I can make it on my own - I'll end up here for the rest of my life," Richard explains emphatically. He sees the way his parents catalogue him: the new surge of energy, bruise-blue bags beneath his eyes long gone, some of the fullness returned to his face. 

So his parents, concerned but too loving to deny him, buy Richard a one way ticket departing the next day into San Francisco International.


	2. Chapter 2

Richard steps out of the airport and the first thing he thinks is oh, I remember what this air smells like. That crisp, salty, west coast air that made his hair soft and his freckles stand out. 

There is something like a panic attack itching under his skin, something that sounds in his ears a lot like the drumming of footsteps shuffling in and out of packed classrooms, of his alarm going off and and knowing there's an exam being taken somewhere across campus that he cannot cannot cannot get up and go to.

He shifts his duffle bag on his shoulder. Recalls Donald Dunn doing much the same, gaping out the window of his airport taxi up at the palm trees, his first time seeing the Pacific. Wherever he is, they've never been closer.

\-----

But the thing is.

The thing is, there is no place to live.

The rent is high - impossibly high - and when Richard calls his mother he says in a shaky voice, "no, no, it's great, I've got this great place locked down with an old classmate" but he's sleeping on top of the sheets at a cheap motel for the third night in a row, thirty minutes outside of Palo Alto.

Which is how he ends up outside a lived-in looking ranch house - bad paint job and cracked driveway, shitty blinds half-drawn in the window - with his laptop under his arm. Stammering as a man in a blazer and, inexplicably, basketball shorts and sandals, crushes his hand in a fierce handshake. His voice booming as he introduces himself as Erlich-Bachman-you-may-have-heard-of-me like it's all one grand, long word.

He corals Richard into the kitchen hurriedly, singing his own praises, illuminating the ins-and-outs of what he calls his "incubator" - you pitch, I can play or pass. You get to stay for a cut of whatever you make. 

"Stanford, huh," Erlich says, when he's finally sat down opposite, his legs spread like he's straddling a throne. "Impressive."

"Mm," Richard says, impassively. 

"And then what'd you do?" 

"I've been," Richard starts, feeling sweat beading on his forehead. "Home. With family."

"Someone sick?"

"Yeah," Richard agrees, not fully lying. "They're ok now." 

"So, whatcha got?" Erlich blusters, leaning back in his chair, doing a terrible job of disguising how much he likes this. "Slideshow? Portfolio? Interactive video?"

"Oh, I t-thought," Richard stammers. "Just? I'd tell you about my app?" 

Erlich stares him down for a second, then waves his hand, as if passing a car through a toll.

"Unimaginative. But go ahead."

"So," Richard begins, clutching one hand around the edge of the table in a desperate search for something grounded. "Um. Pied Piper - "

"Sorry, is that the name?" 

"Um, yep." Richard answers. "Yep."

Erlich pauses for a moment too long, and then waves his hand again, like before. 

"Okay. Right. Pied Piper is a proprietary site that lets you find out if your music is infringing on any existing copyrights."

"Ah," Erlich says, conveying nothing.

"It will be able to search the whole world of recorded music to find out if there's a match. To -- you know, to make sure -- okay, it searches every song and that way _your_ song - "

"Richie, let me stop you right there."

"It's - it's Richard," he begins weakly, but is quickly plowed over.

"What's the pitch?"

Richard swallows down bile. Repeats. "Pied -- Pied Piper is a proprietary - "

"No, no, I get what the app is. But what's the  _pitch_?"

"The -- I'm sorry. What?"

"The pitch," Erlich repeats emphatically. He drums his hand on the table between them three times - hard, sharp raps that make Richard flinch - and leans forward. " _The pitch_. What does it _do_? What makes it _sexy_?" 

"I already said. Using an algorithm that allows a user to search the database of - "

"Okay," Erlich huffs, standing up. "Next. Get out of my house. Room no longer available."

"Wait," Richard begins.

"You don't know what your app is, and if you don't know what it is, you can't sell it. And if you can't sell it, I'm not making any returns on my investment, so my spare room might as well just stay a place where I go to jerk off for a change in scenery."

"No, listen," Richard interjects, leaping to his feet. "I - it's the - it's the Google of music."

Erlich opens his mouth and, wondrously, says nothing at all.

"Did you say, 'the Google of music'?" Erlich parrots back, and Richard looks desperately for some hint of mockery, but can't figure out this blustering brick house of a man, so he merely nods. 

"Now that's a sexy pitch," Erlich says, his face splitting into a genuine grin. He gestures sort of grandly into the space between them. "Sit, sit, Richie, sit. Let me tell you about the house rules."

"It's, um, it's _Richard,_ actually," Richard says again, the correction an old habit, mumbled out almost by rote as he numbly sits down.  

"Okay, now, Richie," Erlich presses on, as if Richard had said nothing at all. "Rule one is I don't help with the moving, so don't even ask."

\-----

Hooli is not the kind of place Richard ever envisioned himself working, when he did inevitably think about that sort of thing back at Stanford. Embarrassingly, when professors asked about where Richard saw himself in five or ten years, he found it hard to imagine anything at all. He'd splutter out some answer about engineering, small teams, a position of leadership, but when he closed his eyes he could really picture no more than himself, hunched over his laptop, typing furiously.

_Hypotheticals frustrate me_ , which is a sentence Richard actually had stammered out in his Hooli interview. The bright-eyed HR rep had quirked an eyebrow. 

"Interesting," he said, leaning forward. "Care to explain?"

"Um. No," had been Richard's anemic answer. 

Richard's perfect score on the technical portion of his application - in light of his admission of actually having not completed his degree at Stanford, year absence from the field, and dismal in-person interview - counted for very little. But, it seems, enough to qualify for a menial position in mobile QA.

A part of Richard's ego kicks up. Thinks, I'm better than this. But it isn't the job he's looking for, anyway. When he arrives on his first day, tripping up a handsome but oddly oblique and shallow clear-plastic staircase to the HR offices to pick up a name tag and ID, he psychs himself up over and over to ask what he's been meaning to ask this whole time.

"Hey, sorry, but um, I think an old family friend works here," Richard says, aiming for nonchalance. The waver in his voice and the way his lanyard gets caught around a shirt button leaves him seeming every inch as flustered as he feels. "His name is uh, Donald Dunn. Do you know what department he's in?"

The woman behind the desk looks up.

"Sorry?"

"Donald Dunn," Richard repeats, a little louder. It occurs to him it's the first time he's actually said the name aloud and it feels a little perverse, somehow, like spilling a secret. 

She types into the computer in front of her.

"There's a Donald Yelchin," she answers. "He's a custodian."

Richard visibly recoils.

"W-what?" he stammers. There's a reactionary vitriol in his voice that the HR assistant clearly notes, her eyes widening. Richard tries to bite it back. Thinks about how far he's come. He saw. He _saw_. Donald Dunn slipping on that Hooli name tag. This _happened_. 

"No, um," Richard continues, trying to stay calm. "His name is definitely Donald Dunn. There is a Donald Dunn who works here. Or worked here?"

She types again, clicks something, and waits. Richard fights an impulse to swing over the desk and look over her shoulder. 

"A Donald DeLeon worked here until about two years ago," she says. "But that's it for as far back as five years." 

Richard nods sharply.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. Um. Okay."

"You have a great day," the woman responds cheerfully, but not without the strong implication that their interaction is over.

Richard steals into the bathroom, mercifully empty. He locks a stall door behind him and thinks, okay, okay, not a big deal, he's here somewhere, or close. Not a big deal. Not a big deal.

He pitches forward and vomits into the toilet. 

\-----

 "Good morning, everyone. I'm sorry to interrupt?"

Richard looks up towards the front of the auditorium so quickly, something in his neck cracks painfully. The gentle lilt of a question, even in a definitive statement. The odd windswept quality of the tone, couched in a soft, round sort of way of speaking.

Richard shoots up from his chair reflexively. Angling to get a closer look.

That's Donald. That's Donald Dunn. A pale blue shirt tucked into long, mustard-colored pants. Big hands gesticulating sort of pleadingly, palms out towards the crowd in supplication, asking for attention instead of demanding it.

"Sit down, dumbass," someone says behind Richard, and tugs on the back of his sweater. Richard thuds into his chair in shock. 

"I know you're all here for the previously scheduled symposium on 'Hooli Phones and Giving Back: Picking Up a Helpful Signal', but unfortunately Gavin has encountered some, uh, pressing conflicts," Donald says into the microphone at the podium. His voice seems hardly any louder when amplified, like it'd hate to impose.

"Please return to your regular work day, and I apologize deeply for the interruption. If you have any complaints or encounter any trouble, you can always request to speak with me." 

The crowd springs to life immediately, chairs creaking, agitated voices picking up and echoing in the large, domed auditorium. Richard cranes his neck, watching Donald walk quickly off stage and down the stairs, disappearing out of a back door.

"W-who was that guy," Richard stammers, suddenly, to the man beside him. The man shrugs, pulling a face that firmly spells out _shut up._

The men behind him - the ones who'd yanked him down - snicker. 

"Why," one croons, "you wanna ask for his number?" 

Richard pushes through the crowd towards a woman near the door, standing with a clipboard and a permanently blissful expression. 

"Hello," she chips, before Richard can even begin his sentence.

"Um. Request a meeting," Richard blurts out. 

"Sorry?"

"I'm, uh. Inconvenienced. Would like a meeting, with that man."

She frowns, looks away briefly as if to round up assistance for this wild-eyed and sweating man before her.

"Um, please," Richard adds, not unkindly. "Sorry."

"I'll put in a request with Jared today," she answers politely. "Is it an emergency?"

Richard wants desperately to insist so, but instead shakes his head. He sees the antagonizing programmers approaching, chatting with their heads very close together, conspiratorial, planning. 

"No. Richard Hendricks. Mobile QA. Thank you."

He takes off.

\----- 

He arrives at work the next morning to an unread email in his Hooli inbox:

_Your request for a meeting with JARED DUNN has been approved. Your appointment is set for TODAY at 3:00PM in Suite 10 D. Please sign in upon arrival._

_Thank you and have a mindful day!_

Richard's hands begin to shake. He stands and paces around his tiny desk - not enclosed by any cubicle walls in classic Hooli fashion - fighting down sudden nausea. He feels eyes watching him, noting, turning away either politely or to grin and gossip, and tries hard to keep his face impassive even as his mind does enthralled, terrified cartwheels. 

Why Jared? Who's Jared?

Jared is Donald. At least, it must be. He'd looked the same. That voice. It was -- unmistakable, Richard thinks. Like something he'd been born knowing. Inherent, and unshakable.

And his face. He was so far away, but to see him even was like an impossible victory. Tall and pale, clean, apologetic in his stance, in how he occupied the space around objects. Richard looks at a clock on the far wall. 9:20am. It feels insurmountable and deeply unfair to be so close to him and still, somehow, separated. Nine floors above, right now, and fully unaware.

Something stills Richard in his pacing, the thought hitting him hard, like a blow to the back of his head. What if Donald doesn't believe you? What if Donald doesn't want to meet you?

And more than that, even if he does, what is it that you want from Donald?

_It's hot innit, Donald?_

_Donald shrugs, pulling his new pajama pants up higher on his hips._

_Sit down here with me for a while. Air's better down here._

_I don't  -- I think I want to go to sleep._

_Donnie. You do what I say, and I say sit down here with me for a bit longer. C'mere, kid. I didn't mean to raise my voice. C'mere._

What is it that you want from Donald, Richard thinks again. And what's to say you deserve it, at all?

\-----

"Richard Hendricks," Jared chirps, as Richard pushes the small office door open. "Right on time. Please, please take a seat!"

He leaps up from his chair and needlessly escorts Richard the seven steps it takes to cross from the door to his small desk. The office is not particularly nice, by Hooli standards. One window, overlooking the back of another structure. Shelves packed wall to wall with binders and spiral-bound documents - from HR manuals to Hooli style guides. On his desk, a laptop and a monitor, a mug, and a small potted plant. Yellow curtains in the windows. A bright blanket draped over the back of the chair Richard sits in. Though the room is sorely lacking any natural light, it distinctly gives the impression someone hoping you'd describe the space as 'sunny.' 

"Would you like some water?" Jared asks as he takes a seat opposite him.

"No, I'm okay." 

Richard is more than a little overwhelmed. The door is shut behind them. He is alone with Donald Dunn.

"I certainly don't want to waste your precious time. I know you have a great deal of Hooli responsibilities on your hands, but your mental health matters a great deal to us, so we thank you for taking the appropriate steps," Jared says, very sweetly, very earnestly, despite scripted-sounding words. "Let's jump right in. Please feel free to speak candidly about the trouble you've encountered."

"Um," Richard mumbles, shifting in his seat. He hadn't anticipated so much to slog through up top. In his fantasies of this moment, he'd burst through the door shouting, _it's you, it's you!_ and it had all been very easy. "I uh. I'm not here about trouble, kinda."

"Oh," Jared says, with a small frown. "I'm sorry, I thought -- well, when it was relayed to me that you were seeking a meeting, I'd assumed it was regarding your difficulties with your peers." 

"What?"

"Workplace bullying is unfortunate but exceedingly common, and those who don't, hm, immediately fit in - ?"

"No, no," Richard snaps, a little petulantly. "That's. What? _No_. I don't care about that." 

"I don't mean to -- I mean, I hate to _press..._ " Jared persists, though gently. Jared seems so apologetic, like he'd singlehandedly let Richard down somehow. 

"Sorry, but uh, how would you know that? I haven't reported anything," Richard interrupts.

"Well, we have, ah," Jared hedges, "floor managers, project leaders, and such? Observing. Two programmers followed you out to your bus just three days ago -- "

"So, like spying," Richard interjects. Jared's jaw clicks shut, his mouth pulled taught into a thin, pale line. 

"No," he assures amenably, after a small and needed moment to recenter himself. "It's. Hm. You know, office surveillance, for the better of the company."

"Sounds an awful lot like spying to me," Richard huffs, a bit petulantly.

"My apologies, I think I may have derailed our conversation," Jared says, very earnestly. He looks down for the briefest moment, adjusting his collar, clearly hiding some embarrassment. "We can speak about whatever you'd like."

Richard takes a deep breath. Watches Jared fold and refold his hands politely on the table between them. Those bony wrists, and beneath that, long, thin fingers with short, rounded nails. Richard had seen them dirty and cut up. He feels something that is akin to pride and dangerously close to love, seeing Jared so clean and well-kept. 

"Um, I. I know who you are," Richard manages.  

Jared cocks his head, his nose crinkling in a wholly endearing way that Richard feels he must look away from, like it's not meant for him to be privy to, like to acknowledge it would mean to reconcile with much, much more.

"All right," Jared replies, sort of amused.

"Four months ago," Richard says. He swallows hard. "Four months ago I tried to kill myself and I think. I - I _know_. I know I saw your life. Before I woke up. I saw your life. And I came here to find you."

Jared sits back in his chair heavily with a soft _thunk_ against the wood, his expression settling into something unfamiliarly heavy and preoccupied, like it takes a very long time for Richard's words to even reach him across the small desk. 

After a long while, Jared's mouth starts to move, like he's forming and abandoning the start of a hundred different sentences. He eventually manages to rasp,

"I. Oh. Oh, dear."

Richard just nods. Jared mirrors that nodding motion, perhaps unconsciously.

"Is that..." Jared begins, and then he closes his eyes for a moment. Flinches, as if scolded, though Richard says and does nothing at all. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry to hear that."

"It's, uh, y'know, okay," Richard says, shifting uneasily in his seat. He realizes he's never told anyone this before, and he's thoroughly uncomfortable with the reaction. The pity, the shock, the silent and obvious deliberation about what words to use.

Jared lowers his head a little, looks up at Richard tentatively, almost embarrassedly, from beneath a worried, furrowed brow.

"You're certain it was me?" Jared asks plaintively, his voice very small.

"Yeah," Richard assures, but he sounds tentative and adrift.

He doesn't have any better answers. He'd hoped, foolishly, just meeting would be enough to join the scattered pieces. Like something amazing and profound would happen, something that joined them, something intimately special that Jared would inherently sense. Richard would touch his hand. Jared would say he knew this was going to happen. Jared would say something like, I saw you too, I know who you are. 

But instead Jared clears his throat. He adjusts his position almost part by part. His back straightening, his palms hands down on the table, the expression shifting from something like intrigue and desire to a moderate, appropriate blankness.

"Richard - Mr. Hendricks - I - " His expression softens, his shoulders finding a familiar, apologetic hunch as he leans closer over the desk. Trying. Genuinely trying to connect.

"Whatever it is you've been through, I'm so sorry. And I'm - well - I'm happy you told me. There's a lot of help we can offer."

Richard nods, feeling on edge. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"It may appear to you like I couldn't possibly understand, but I've been where you are so many times. But to ah, to craft some sort of lie, or story? We can just see if there's a department we can transfer you to."

Richard hears himself bark a sharp, shocked little sound, a sound he's hardly even aware of making, but it feels smacked straight out of him. He straightens in his chair, biting back an unexpected, reactionary anger. 

"You think I'm lying," Richard challenges. Jared, despite his status, shrinks back a bit. Richard feels an immediate pang of guilt, sifting through old memories at the same time Jared must, like paging through a Rolodex of nasty behavior.  _Dumbshit kid, you wanna talk back to me? You do what I tell you. Don't you flinch. Listen to me. Listen to me. Show me your fucking arm._

"I don't mean to imply that. A story about, well, about an attempted suicide -- Richard, if it's true, we can find counseling for you here. If it isn't, I can still have you transferred. You're in no trouble. I would never betray your secret."

"No, no, listen," Richard stammers. "Donald Dunn. You -- you are Donald Dunn. Yeah?"

"Yes," Jared replies, the word heavy, as he swallows thickly.

"Donald. I know. I know everything. Your mom when you were ten, and then living with your aunt and uncle. There's a -- there's a cigarette burn on the inside of your elbow!"

Jared's left hand rises to cover that spot, almost unthinkingly. He says absolutely nothing but looks pinned, frightened.

"I'm not fucking with you. I saw it. I saw all of it. And I wanted to meet you. To be sure you were real."

Jared blinks back at him owlishly. He ventures, quietly, "and?" 

"You are," Richard answers. He feels his face split into a grin. Something - he realizes - he hasn't done in a very, very long time.

Jared stares back at him, returning none of the unbridled enthusiasm.

"Ah," Jared says, cooly. He nods a few times in quick succession. Sharp, purposeful nods, like he's processing. He stands.

"I think perhaps this topic is not appropriate for our meeting, Mr. Hendricks." 

"What topic," Richard snaps. 

Jared flushes bright red as he answers, " _Me_." He heaves a short breath and gestures limply to the side. "I'd like to show you to the door."

Richard's face falls.

"You don't believe me," he manages, and his voice cracks like a china plate.

"It's, well," Jared says, diplomatically, "It's -- if it's a prank, it's a cruel one. All this about my family. It certainly isn't funny. And even if it isn't intended to be some sort of joke, these -- I mean there's no reason for me to believe that - "

"Wait," Richard yelps, standing too. Jared raises an eyebrow, visibly trepidatious. Richard thinks, okay okay okay. Do not lose him. Do not come this far and lose him. He takes a deep breath.

"I -- I know about the law suit." 

Jared instantly pales. His posture becomes very, very rigid, his face very, very still.

"Excuse me?"

"If I -- if I didn't know you, if I didn't _really_ know you, how could I know about the law suit? Those documents are sealed, right? I couldn't look this up. You were sixteen. You were living in - " 

"Okay," Jared says, nodding. He shoves his hands in the front pockets of his nice slacks and nods a few more times, resolutely. He repeats, "Okay. Yes. I see."

"You do," Richard ventures, stepping forward.

"If this is, um, if you are intending to use this as some sort of blackmail or coercion, I won't push back."

"N-no," Richard stammers.

"I have my checkbook now."

"I don't want your money," Richard quickly protests. Jared touches the lapels of his suit jacket and nods again.

"Understood," Jared says, sort of distantly, his tone hard and the look that comes over his face hard, then, too, "If it's -- something physical you want from me - "

"Christ, no, Donald - "

"It's _Jared_ ," he snaps, very firmly. He takes a short breath, like he'd only just remembered he isn't comfortable behaving this way, like he knows he's not the kind of person who shouts. He begins again, with visible effort,

"Please, sir, if you don't require anything else from me you can at least have the decency to call me by my name."

"Jared," Richard says placatingly, hoping the name shows a willingness to cooperate. "Jared, I know this sounds crazy but I know -- I mean I _saw_ \-- saw everything about your life. I don't know how, it just happened."

Jared looks a bit winded, a bit like he'd just been shoved very hard, sort of beleaguered and bullied and nervous. 

"Why me," he manages, in a very tight voice. 

Richard shrugs. Would almost laugh if he didn't think perhaps it would frighten Jared or, maybe, leave him too breathless and scared too continue. 

"I don't know," Richard answers. Jared shifts, slightly, on his feet. Interest piqued. Richard's ugly, blazing vulnerability a lure, whether Jared likes it or not. Stammeringly, he begins, "It's - I. All I know. Jared, all I know is I tried to kill myself and then, somehow, there was you. And I -- fuck. Fuck, it does sound crazy."

Richard thread his fingers into his hair and gives a sharp, almost scolding tug.

"I haven't told anyone that. I mean my family knows about the suicide but, you? About you? It's -- " he exhales, letting his hands fall to his sides limply. "You can see what a shitty fucking job I'm doing of... of convincing you it's real. I don't know why this happened. I felt like, if I met you, it would all make sense -- "

"I should be out of work at six," Jared interrupts, oddly bold. There's some strange electricity between them - something that feels like Jared leaning in, whispering conspiratorially, even though he's still standing upright and proper, just behind his desk. "You can meet me outside parking structure B." 

"Yeah," Richard answers. "I'll be there."


	3. Chapter 3

Richard hears him first - the approaching clap of nice hard-soled shoes against asphalt - as Jared trots towards Richard, idling on his phone, at the entrance of the parking garage. 

"I'm sorry I'm so late. Very rude of me," he pants. "Gavin had -- there were some contracts to peruse."

"It's okay," Richard deflects, nodding. Being so close to Jared is nauseating, almost. Not in a nervous way, not in the dread-and-doom way Richard feels as he edges into a panic attack, not the anxious way his stomach cramps up like someone has an insistent, angry grip around it. It's overwhelming, is what it is. Seeing him up close, grappling with his undeniable reality. The feeling of familiarity across an impossible chasm of time and distance. Jared's eyes are so blue and Richard's seen them for what feels like thousands of times and, somehow, for the first time ever, just now. He recalls Jared touching his eye, bruised, bent over and squinting into a dusty mirror while someone pounds on the door behind him. How satisfying to see him unharmed. 

"Richard Hendricks," Jared says, almost wondrously. "I - I looked at your file. You've only been with Hooli for a month."

Richard nods. "I came here to, um. To meet you."

Jared's face flushes red. Richard watches him close his eyes for a moment. Exhale. Swallow.

"Because you feel we've met before?"

"Not met," Richard corrects, perhaps a little too vehemently. "We've never -- I mean we've never been in the same place at the same time. But your life... I saw your... your whole life."

"That's, ah," Jared starts, nervously digging for his car keys in his pant pocket. He grips them hard in his fist. "If that is true. If that's even the sort of thing that can be true..."

Jared looks away, his gaze following an arrow of seagulls in flight, up and over the top of the parking garage and away into the orange-pink of an early sunset. 

"You've seen a lot of things I wouldn't dare tell another person."

"Sorry," Richard answers reflexively. "I wasn't. Um. I wasn't trying to."

"Richard," Jared says, then, very suddenly. Like the word shoots out of him like a kicked pebble skittering across pavement. "This is impossible. Isn't this frightening?"

But Jared is smiling just a little, his eyes a little too wide, like he's shocked to be feeling that way at all. They walk to Jared's car and get in, in silence, the both of them biting down on the insides of their cheek, trying not to feel like something very, very good is happening.

\-----

Jared takes him to a quiet restaurant with big windows that open onto a courtyard. Small birds peck around beneath, chattering noisily as the light of the day dwindles.

Richard watches him from across the small booth. Jared delicately stirring a packet of brown sugar into his hot tea, waving Richard on politely, insisting he order some food for himself.

"I'm um. I don't know if I'm hungry," Richard says, a bit transfixed by Jared's nimble hands. Every part of him, so fully materialized and impossibly real.

Jared huffs a small laugh. "No, me neither." He pauses, looking out the window with a heavy expression, biting something back. 

"I'm sorry," he says, with effort. "It's not -- it's not that I don't believe you. It's just..." 

Jared looks down into his mug of tea like it suddenly is so unappetizing, like he can't believe he ordered it for himself at all. He pushes it towards the center of the table with one lean, strong finger.

"Why me?" Jared concludes. He retracts his hand. Folds them both in his lap with a heavy sigh.

"I don't know," Richard answers truthfully. "But I... it was you."

"Things like this," Jared answers diplomatically. "Exciting, strange things like this. They don't happen to me." He swallows. Chances a look up at Richard, who miraculously doesn't look angry or disgusted or bored yet. 

"I, um, I dropped out of college and moved home," Richard offers, as evenly as he can manage. Jared looks like he might say something - some kind, comforting thing - so Richard plows on quickly. "I was having these panic attacks at school. Bad shit. Locked in my room for days, beating myself up. I mean literally. I still have a - a mark on the back of my head when I cracked my head too hard into a door?"

Richard has not admitted so much so plainly to anyone. Even his parents, who know more than anyone else, garnered most of their information from staggered, quick outbursts of vocal upset when Richard broke down on the couch. His mother's hand on his knee. Something apologetic stuttered through a locked door as dinner grew cold on the table downstairs. 

Jared looks back intently. Attentive, but not pitying, which Richard appreciates.

"I moved home and thought, maybe it'll get better. Maybe I'll take a break and go back to school and prove that I'm, y'know, the genius everyone says I am. And then uh, well you know. What ended up happening. What I did." 

The waiter deposits two glasses of water on the table. Neither of them look up, caught in a moment that is both frightening and intensely, impossibly relieving. Jared's face is exactly as Richard had remembered it and still, somehow, both different and better. His gaze more attentive, more alert with something fastidious and empathetic. His frown less sad than he'd recalled and more ponderous, or interested. Handsome, too. He tries to shake that thought off but it sticks, insistent, alluring.

"Not to me, either," Richard asserts. "Things like this don't happen to me." 

"Do you want to come back to my apartment," Jared asks, not breaking eye contact. Richard nods, watches Jared leave cash on the table for his tea and a sizable tip. Jared's hands are shaking but his expression is unnaturally serene.

Richard wonders what would happen if he grabbed Jared's hand. Right now, here, following Jared out to his car in the parking lot of some clean Palo Alto diner. A place brand new and designed to look old, like it would fool someone into a sense of familiarity.  

Richard has known Jared for barely an hour. Richard has known Jared for his entire life. 

Jared turns around and puts his hand on Richard's shoulder. 

"I'm sorry for what happened to you," Jared says, very seriously. "I don't -- I'm sorry for implying you would lie about something like that." 

Before Richard can respond, Jared has peeled his cool hand away and is unlocking the car door, slipping into the driver's seat. 

\----- 

It's 3:30 in the morning. Richard touches his chest, just over his heart. 

"We stayed up all night," Jared says, sort of ploddingly, like he should feel bad about that but doesn't. He sits up a bit more formally on the couch, in a less relaxed, comfortable slouch. A position they'd fallen into some time around midnight. Talking the entire while. Richard's legs tucked up against his chest, Jared's arm resting on the back of the couch, slung somewhere above Richard's shoulders.

"Yeah," Richard agrees. His voice is tired, but he is awake. Wired, and not in the jittery, doom-spun way he'd felt facing insomnia at home. He feels a bone-deep excitement. The feeling of something clicking into place. Fixing a bug in his programming. Stringing together new functions. Yes, Richard thinks. Yes. Like _that._  

"Richard, I," Jared begins, but his voice tapers off, small and tight, even as he keeps looking back at him with an unwavering focus. "Thank you for telling me what you told me."

"Do you believe me?" 

Jared nods, stiffly. Like he's surprised to even be admitting it to himself.

"If I can," Jared ventures, only barely managing to keep his voice even. "Can I - it's such a foolish question, but..." 

"No, whatever," Richard encourages, waving him on.

"If you've really seen everything that's happened to me. Throughout my life, everything I've done," he pauses, searches for the appropriate words, "everything that has been done to me..." 

Richard moves closer on the couch. Just a bit, but noticeably. Purposefully so.

"Did I... I mean for so many people to have been so..." Jared swallows. "Did I do something? Something to - to invite it?"

Richard's face slowly contorts, caught between surprise and, seemingly, disgust. Jared recoils, despite himself.

"I mean, some way I acted," he corrects, keeping his posture straight, his tone clipped. It's just a briefing. A deposition. Richard does not ever need to know it's a question he's pondered on and off for the better part of his life, sleepless at nights, staring longingly out of car windows as he's shipped off to some new foster home. 

"Or... or... it hardly matters. I'm sorry I asked. It's just to have another opinion -- someone who saw it all. I've always wondered."

Richard's hand finds Jared's. Or, that is to say, he nearly snatches it out of the air where it stuttered anxiously between them. Jared looks first at his hand, almost crushed in Richard's insistent grip. Then up at Richard, very pale and very serious.

"No," Richard says, with apparent difficulty. "Okay?" 

Jared nods. It is maybe the kindest, most alleviating thing anyone has ever said to him. These two quiet, simple words. Words he'd tried to tell himself for years. But here, now, looking back at Richard - so somber, his very existence so unlikely - Jared has no reason but to believe he's telling the truth. 

"Thank you," Jared manages, so quiet the words are almost lost among the soft thwack of the box fan, the hum of the street light outside his window.

When he walks Richard to the door, a part of him says, _kiss him goodbye_. A part of him insists, _Richard wants it._ The way he angles his face up towards him a plant seeking sunlight, the way he stutteringly asks permission to see Jared again soon, maybe tomorrow after work.

But instead he orders Richard a car home. Says a polite, professional goodbye. And only alone - under the covers in his clean, starched bedsheets, sunrise just a few ticks away - does he exhale all of the breath he's been holding for what feels like hours and cries.

\-----

There's something that comes over Jared when he's being shouted at. Something familiar and almost expected, like deja vu, like turning on an old home movie and recognizing yourself in the picture. Something deserved and inevitable.

He almost doesn't hear what Gavin is saying anymore. He nods back dutifully. He doesn't flinch when Gavin leans down and clears everything on Jared's small desk onto the floor in one vicious swipe.

It is his fault though, isn't it? To have forgotten about the conference call? To have left Gavin on the line to falter through it himself? It is his fault. Caught up in the restroom splashing water on his face. Exhausted from losing sleep the night before. Distracted by the idea that someone cared about him. Wanted to see him again. Gavin leaves in a huff, red faced and still shouting, his anger turned elsewhere. 

Jared stoops down to clean up the potted plant, shattered on the floor like a crime scene. He bites his lip as he picks through the soil for crushed pieces of terra cotta, the sad, naked looking roots and barely-sprouted leaves now unmoored and unable to grow.

"Donald, Donald, you did this to yourself," he tells himself, scooping up the dirt on his rug as best as possible with two pieces of printer paper. Gavin is still shouting down the hall. He hears his own name.

Jared doesn't have time for impossible things like Richard. Sweet, nervous Richard, who held his hand last night. When can I see you again, Richard had asked.

Another Jared would've said, Richard, soon, now! Any time you want! Richard, how remarkable, how utterly fantastic that you found me. I'm so lonely. I'm so lonely. Oh. Richard. I'm so lonely. 

But that Jared isn't real. He's as much a fantasy as the Jared poor Richard must've imagined for himself: someone interesting and worthwhile of his time and attention. 

Jared leaves dirt wedged in the ridges of his woven carpet and takes off down the hallway. Back to Gavin. Richard texts not long after: _can I meet you after work again tonight?_

Jared knows nothing good has ever come from wanting, so he does not text back. He only looks at the text throughout the day. Just before bed, his fingers hovering over the keyboard of his phone.

Richard is an exciting thing. A wonderful thing. What would Jared know about something like that? He goes to bed. 

\-----

But still, despite it all, there's Richard.

Like the newspaper on your doorstep. Like the first splattering of rain after a crack of thunder. Like the moment just after a song has finished - bows lifted off strings, instruments lowered gently into laps - the electric moment just before applause when everything is finished but still, somehow, just about to start again.

Richard is there. Richard is skittish and difficult and insistent but, too, Richard is _there_.

It occurs to Jared that no one has ever courted him or desired his attention for any reasons that hadn't skewed somewhat sinister. Richard has told him the truth. It is too wild, too desperate, too devastating not to be true. And, if it isn't true - if it is some sort of fantastic fever dream they're both sharing - he's not entirely sure he objects. 

If Richard wants something after all this, Jared reasons, he's waited an awfully long time to ask for it.

When Jared had tried to distance himself that first time, Richard showed up at Jared's office. He panted, "you didn't return my texts" like it was a very serious, obvious transgression.  

"I'm sorry, Richard," Jared had exhaled. "You have to understand. I'm so busy. I could get in trouble just for having this conversation."

"Okay," Richard shrugged. "Conversation over. I'll wait in the lobby until you're done with work."

As is often the case with Gavin, there is a lot of work that is of utmost priority, and all of it need be completed without his assistance. Jared stumbles, bleary eyed, into the main foyer many hours later. There is a man polishing the floors and, on a padded bench near the front door, a red hoodie bent over a phone screen.

"Hey," Richard says nonchalantly as Jared slowly approaches, looking up into Jared's face, eyelids heavy with exhaustion, his usually neatly-parted hair come loose as he'd threaded through it with well-contained frustration.

"Richard," Jared exhales. "You stayed. You -- that's -- you really shouldn't have. It's late." 

Richard pockets his phone. "I said I'd meet you after work."

"It's almost nine at night."

Richard bites his bottom lip sort of distractedly and shrugs.

Jared's voice is oddly small when he speaks again, a voice that conveys not just exhaustion or surprise, but a shaken, untethered quality. 

"You stayed all this time for me."

"Uh," Richard mumbles, biting back a smile. "Yeah."

Like it's so simple. Like it's something Jared could've ever expected.

And that's exactly how it continues. At work. In Jared's car. Quiet, in the bedroom at the shoddy incubator where Richard lives, both bent over Richard's laptop as he excitedly explains Pied Piper. Their arms touching. Their knees pressed against each other. Richard knows Jared's skin is cool because he'd seen it, heard it, in his travel through his life. But Jared feels luckier, somehow. Jared knows Richard's skin is hot, because he's _felt_ it. 

\-----

"You know, all this time... I mean, I come all this way and almost can't find you because you changed your stupid name." 

Jared laughs, his hands coming up to cover his face; trying to stifle the sound for Richard's landlord Erlich, fast asleep down the hall. Trying to hide the stunned and smitten delight spelled out so plainly on his face.  

Of course he wants Richard. Of course he does. Pressed up against him, arm to arm, flat out on Richard tiny, rickety loft bed. Chaste, above the sheets, but so close he can smell Richard's cheap shampoo and soft, downy, woody smell, like opening a new box of pencils.

He wants him, and he covers his face, because he fears Richard will see it. And if Richard knows, there's no turning back. 

\----- 

Richard is almost unsurprised when it all comes apart. It's surely in line with his usual failings. 

Maybe this is the punchline of some cosmic joke, some profound injustice with so much build-up. He should laugh, looking at himself. Richard ever the failure. Richard who couldn't even kill himself properly.

He looks at the shut door and cannot remember how long he's been standing out here. And inside, Jared. Whose hands had been so strangely assured and deft. His lips soft; the hot, short pant of his breath as they'd pulled close. 

And moments ago. Fuck. Just moments ago --

A too-late night at Jared's. Looking at the clock, Jared often tuts and says, "we can't keep this up" but easily, happily falls into again the next evening.

Richard stepping close in Jared's small kitchen. Jared looking back at him with a measure of surprise, but choosing not to move away.

"You're so," Richard says, his tongue feeling too heavy, too thick in his own mouth. "Good." 

Jared wrinkles his nose, somewhere between amused and perplexed. 

"Me?"

"Mm," Richard affirms. Jared watches Richard step closer and - as a shudder crackles up his spine - his face falls. Settles into something serious but not unhappy. Jared tugs for a moment, nervously, at the hair hanging above his left ear.

"Why do you say that, Richard? Because of - of what you saw of me? In the past?"

Richard shakes his head, catches Jared's hand as it falls and clutches tight to it like it's the only thing tethering him to the floor.

"No, Jared. Now. You - " Richard closes his eyes, heaves a short, nervous breath. "Jared. What if I."

He doesn't finish that sentence. He touches Jared's jaw with two fingers. Asking. Hopeful. Jared, despite himself, or - perhaps - for himself and with utmost sincerity, lets Richard angle his head towards him. Watches Richard fixate for a nervous, white-hot moment on his lips and lift, a little too quickly, to meet them. 

It is wonderful, they both think. Richard has seen Donald - Jared - kiss other men in his impossible travel across his life like a stone skipping on water, never staying too long but touching, briefly, for just enough time. Kisses that were kind, or nervous, or too insistent and crushing. A man grinning and exhaling cigarette smoke into Jared's mouth as he firmly, politely, coughed and pushed him away. Richard wonders if Jared is thinking about it too and kisses harder, almost in retaliation. Jared gasps a surprised, delighted sound into Richard's mouth and Richard thrills. This is why I was supposed to find you, Richard wants to say, reaching up and threading a hand in Jared's hair. This. This. Richard hasn't kissed a man before - hasn't done much kissing at all, wasn't sure it was even something he liked, so wet and complicated and hard to coordinate - _but this_ , he wants to sigh. _This_.

Jared pulls back, but only to catch his breath. He hears Jared exhaling shakily.

"That was," Jared starts, an odd quaver in his voice. "Oh. I liked how you touched my hair." 

"Yeah?" Richard asks, feeling emboldened, threading his fingers at the nape of his neck again.

Jared closes his eyes and nods - a small, frightened little movement, like any more firm acknowledgement of his enjoyment might spell out disaster. 

"Gosh, you're kind," Jared says, his eyes still pressed closed. "Richard. Richard. You  - " 

"It's okay," Richard says, reeling him back in. "Let's -- please." 

"Richard," Jared says again, more insistent. He puts a hand on Richard's shoulder and opens his mouth to speak, but a tiny sound escapes, something like a whine. He winces, embarrassed, and re-centers himself with a deep breath. 

"Richard, this could be the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me."

"Yes," Richard affirms, huskily. He digs fingers into Jared's hip. Shudders, repressing a sudden swell of a strong emotion too big and wild to name.

"But I don't know who you think I am. What you expect of me. And if this ends -- if I'm not who you need me to be. It'll break my heart."

"That won't happen," Richard affirms. Jared steps back, out of his grasp.

"You don't know that, Richard," Jared placates. "You don't know me."

Richard chokes, "yes, I do," but only barely. His voice tight and breathless, like he'd been punched in the gut. His eyes are wet with unshed tears. Jared needs to look away, knowing the sight of him, so open and wanting, only makes this more impossible. 

"Not really," Jared answers. He slides his hands into his pockets and shrugs apologetically. Minimizing space. Atoning for his own existence. "You might think you do but -- " 

Richard is not one for hypotheticals. Richard has never been able to picture himself in situations beyond the present. But that night, as Jared closed the door between them, his face pallid and beaten-looking, Richard had suddenly realized he'd been painting Jared into all of his visions of the future. Ones of the next day, or years down the line.


	4. Chapter 4

Richard --

Forgive me. Our time together will be always cherished. It has been an immeasurable delight having you as a friend. As you know - though I am almost embarrassed to even mention it, despite you claiming to have seen it all nonetheless - I have been strapped for truly good friends all my life. To have an ally like you, someone kind and clever and undemanding of me, is almost more than I deserve. It does, perhaps, exceed what I deserve, in light of how I seemed to have shocked you last night.

Perhaps someday you'll forgive me. I would understand if you do not. Regardless, I hope deeply, profoundly, that you find someone who can return all the love you have to offer. Someone, maybe, who is as brave as you are.

I have passed Pied Piper up to Gavin Belson, and plan to prioritize it in our debriefing this morning. I hope you do not disapprove. Your work is exceptional and if I've failed you in one regard, I hope to help you in another. If Gavin Belson presents you an offer, you need not take it, but you can use it to leverage other meetings. 

I warned you that you were a genius. :) Maybe this'll get you the money to move out of Erlich's!

If you want me, you know where to find me. 

With affection,  
Jared 

\----- 

"Stop, stop," Gavin interrupts, tossing the file he'd been previously preoccupied with - so preoccupied he hadn't looked up at Jared once - onto the large wooden desk between them.

"You're telling me this employee is working on this app on Hooli equipment? On Hooli time? Because we own that. We own that app." 

"No," Jared says, delicately. Correcting Gavin must always be delicate; pretending you don't already have the right answer but instead are arriving there together. "It's entirely outside of work. Something he needs to work on to maintain a - um - a living situation." 

"But you're saying it's good?"

"Gavin," Jared says with deep sincerity. "It's remarkable. Revolutionary. Richard hardly understands the processing power he's built into it."

Gavin kicks his legs off the desk and leans forward.

"And he hasn't taken any other meetings?"

Jared feels a twinge of discomfort. One easily tamped down by years of ignoring discomforts, professional or otherwise. 

"No, Gavin. I needed to tell him it was worthwhile at all, or else he would've - " 

"Hold on," Gavin interrupts again. Jared moves to sit in the chair opposite and Gavin waves a sharp, dismissive hand at him, as if shooing him away. Jared springs back to attention again, tenser than before. 

"How long have you known about this?" 

"Two weeks, maybe."

Gavin makes a show of expressing his visible unhappiness, bristling in his chair, throwing up his hands.

"You've been telling him it's great for two weeks and you want me to believe this kid hasn't been fucking peacocking this revolutionary app around to every VC in town?" 

Jared feels himself shrinking back.

"No meetings," he repeats, as firmly as he can manage. If not for his own sake, then for Richard's, who deserves money and security and a good stable life that Jared is too frightened to be a part of. "If I hadn't expressed a desire in pitching it to Hooli, he likely wouldn't have  - "

"Jared, I want you to look me in the eye and say 'I should have come to you on day one, I'm a fucking idiot.' And then I want you to get this kid on the phone."

"You're right, Gavin," Jared concedes. "I should have told you."

Gavin steeples his fingers on the desk before him. He shakes his head.

"Say it. Say you're a fucking idiot." 

"I - I am. I'm an idiot."

"I'm a _fucking_ idiot, Jared, say it."

"I'm a f -- " Jared's throat closes around the word. "Gavin, I promise you, you'll have a deal made by the end of the day tomorrow."

"Fucking right I will," Gavin crows, seemingly forgetting his latest attempt at personal humiliation. "You're gonna get this - this - "

"Hendricks. Richard Hendricks."

"You're gonna get this Hendricks kid in my office bright and early tomorrow. Tell him nothing. If he's not taking meetings, there's no reason not to believe we can't buy him out for - what - sixty thousand?"

"Gavin," Jared says, so tentatively, so painfully aware that the wrong words could bring the heft of that awful, vindictive degradation back his way. "This - I think - even if you undersell him... I mean, I really think this could be a million dollar idea."

Gavin grins. Vindicated. Sharklike.

"I know, right?" he replies, and Jared digs what he can of his well-kept nails into his palms to keep from fighting. He pulls out his phone to call him. Wonderful Richard, who'd clung to his hands and pleaded Jared, Jared, listen, we're -- why can't you believe we were meant to meet each other?

For exactly this reason, Jared thinks. Because at some point, his life was bound to pollute Richard's - brand new and full of hope after so much disappointment. Jared wishes Richard had perhaps dreamed another person's life in that strange, inexplicable fugue. If he'd found someone else, he'd be happy by now. Satisfied. Richard's voice crackles to life on the other end of the line. Gavin leans forward expectantly.

 -----

"Sixty thousand?" 

Gavin leans casually back onto his desk - a massive wooden and impressively polished affair - and nods, very solemnly, but smiles like he knows a fantastic secret. There's something about Gavin that is somewhat magic, Richard thinks, almost embarrassed by the thought even as it occurs to him. Relaxed in his too-big office, but so focused on Richard it feels like there's no one else in the building.

Not even Jared, hovering somewhere behind Gavin, head bowed and hands shoved deep into his pockets, the very picture of silent contrition.  

"Do your parents know you've been working on this app?"

"Um, no," Richard answers.

"Wow," Gavin exhales, sort of wondrously. "Can you imagine? Calling them and telling them you just snagged sixty thousand dollars selling your app to Hooli - arguably the number one tech company in the world?"

_But I hate Hooli_ , Richard thinks, almost pleadingly. It rings strangely untrue in the moment, Richard's gut twisting and snaking, part excitement and part trepidation.  _I hate everything you fucking stand for_. He remembers his mother holding him in the airport, kissing his cheek, whispering, "this time, this time I know it's going to be better for you, Richard." How good it would feel to call her. To tell her she was right. 

"From... ah..." Gavin starts, casting a quick look behind him at a file open on his desk, "from obscurity in mobile QA, to this? And it'd surely come with a promotion. Jared'll work out the kinks later. Whatever you want to do, Richard, we'll set you up in that department."

Richard remembers Jared's pointed words - still so polite, so diplomatic, even in his most unguarded moments. Picking at his dinner, recalling the way Gavin had demeaned him in a meeting earlier that day. Feet dipped into Erlich's pool out back as they talked late into the night, recounting the week Gavin had the doors to Jared's office taken off its hinges, convinced that Jared was being too secretive, or shirking his responsibilities.

"It's funny," Jared had said, then, crinkling his nose like it was actually something amusing and not very, very sobering, "I didn't even realize how bad it all sounds until I started telling you about it, Richard."

"Is it, um," Richard croaks, past his slack-jawed shock. "Is that like, a normal offer?" 

"Is it _normal_ ," Gavin challenges, craning his head like he's gawking at a roadside accident, like Richard had just burst into flames in front of him. "What does it matter if it's normal? What it is, is _good_. A great fucking offer."

It feels much less like encouragement than being beaten over the head with aggressive goodwill, but Gavin still turns on a megawatt smile, all bright white teeth, perfectly square and straight. Richard's eyes flick to Jared, who doesn't move, doesn't even look up. Gavin, attune to everything, notices the shift in attention immediately, with only a trace of disgust on his face.

Gavin quickly continues, "You wouldn't be getting an offer like this if Jared hadn't made such a fuss. I mean, he begged, you should've seen it."

Richard has seen it. Many times. His arm bent behind his back and some kid - some older foster sibling - egging, _come on, come on, fucking say it Donald. Beg me to stop_. Unkind erstwhile lovers with demands. Foster parents with threats. _You think that's bad? Tonight, you want food, you can get down and beg for it._

"He didn't beg," Richard affirms, sort of hollowly. At Gavin's accusatory, furious look, he shrugs, equal parts embarrassed and vindicated. "He didn't."

There's a part of him that wants to look at Jared, but he's too overwhelmed, too frightened to see what might be broadcasted back at him. It is too much, too much to reconcile with and still be separated from Jared, who has made it very clear what he cannot accept from Richard anymore. 

"Okay," Gavin splutters, waving a hand in the space between them like Richard disgusts him, like he wants him cleared away like old food. "So he didn't beg. What does it matter? He pitched your app to me. I want it. End of story."

"Don't," is the quiet, firm voice from the back of the room. They both snap to look at Jared, who is steely and resolute looking, standing impressively tall at the rare fullest of his height, feet firmly planted on the ground. It would almost be impossible - entirely, eerily unlike the Jared they know at all - if he weren't also clutching his hands tightly together, which shake so violently that it rattles his whole body. 

"What did you say," Gavin challenges, unable to keep a biting vitriol out of his tone.

"Richard, this deal - don't sign it. Gavin's offer is..." He shakes his head. "You'd be better off alone, without the money. You can build it yourself. I know you can."

Gavin swings around and slams both hands, hard, on the table.

"Shut up, shut the -- Richard, take a seat while I get my _fucking employee_ out of my office."

Jared, again, very calmly shakes his head.

"Whatever you do, Richard won't take the deal," he says. "Not as it stands. Not with the terms you've outlined." 

Gavin stomps loudly around to the other side of his desk, seething, spitting through his teeth,

"I should have your head cracked open. See if there's an iota of brain left in there, you imbecilic - "  

"Jared," Richard says, a little too forcefully. Jared flinches. First, at Richard's voice, then at Gavin's hand, slapped against the wall beside his head.

"Hello?" Gavin crows, mockingly. "Are you even fucking listening?"

"Jared," he insists again, "Come on. We're out of here. Come on."

Before Jared can move, before he can open his mouth, someone has a strong hand around Richard's arm, dragging him out of the office. 

"You have the rest of the week off, paid vacation," the man with a security badge grits out. He swipes a card, which opens the stainless steel doors of an elevator Richard has never seen before. Unceremoniously, he shoves Richard inside it. "Have a mindful day."

Gavin's door down the hallway has been shut. The blinds lowered. Richard fumbles for a button to open the doors again, to bring him back to that top floor, but there is only a LOBBY button, already illuminated, sending Richard plummeting back down into absolute, flat-out nothingness.

\----- 

Jared drops his Hooli name tag into a cardboard box. It clacks against his other possessions. A few business textbooks. A cheap stone paperweight. His framed diploma from Vassar.

"Actually, sir, it's been requested that none of your possessions leave Hooli campus," a security guard on his floor says tersely as he stops Jared by the elevator banks. He casts a look down into scant little he owns. The yellow curtains folded up neatly, a false promise to those who'd entered his office - even himself - that happiness could be found here. Resigned, Jared hands over the box.

"We'll send you whatever passes the security check," he continues. But Jared knows it's as good as gone. It all is. Gavin, who'd gleefully sneered, "you'll be lucky to get so much as a courtesy 'fuck off, we're not interested' email in this town when I'm through with you." Richard, who'd laid so much on the line to meet Jared, resolutely turned away, despondent and pleading, and now not even with money. 

But still, as he walks away from the Hooli campus, climbs into his car imagining what it was like that first evening with Richard beside him in the passenger seat, he finds himself so relieved he could cry. What a foolish thing to do, he thinks. What a brave, wild, reactionary thing to do, just for Richard's sake. 

Richard had thought Jared capable of so much more than he is. But this. This is the kind of thing Richard's Jared would do. He backs carefully out of his parking space and drives out, away, for good. 

\----- 

Richard nearly tumbles in through Jared's front door as Jared quickly opens it.

"Sorry, sorry," Richard stammers, the words tripping out of him with just as little grace as he rights himself. "Did I scare you?"

"No," Jared lies uneasily, eyeing the door as he shuts it. Wanting to be certain they are alone. There is a part of him that wonders if Richard has come to shout at him. In this moment, after the unusual circumstances of the day - feeling emboldened by his own rashness, by the feeling of both feet planted firmly on the ground - he might even stand up for himself.

But then he notices Richard's hand gripped tight - white knuckled - around the top of a green, glass bottle. 

"Is there - I'm sorry are you celebrating something?" Jared asks, gesturing towards the apparent bottle of champagne clutched in Richard's hand, now sweating profusely in the heat. He watches a droplet of water splatter onto his tan carpet. 

"No, it's for you," Richard responds. At Jared's pinched, perplexed expression, he stammers, "I mean, I want it to be. If you want it. I want you to take it."

"Um, Richard," Jared ventures, tightly. "I was fired today."

Richard throws up his hands in indignation, the bottle with it. Jared watches it slosh dangerously beneath its sealed cap, notes to be wary of that for later.

"I know," Richard yelps, "They kicked me out and I went back, and they wouldn't let me in the fucking building. And I kept asking and asking and finally someone goes, 'your friend has been let go' and I think - you know - fuck you! So I quit, too, and they won't even give me the stuff in my desk back." 

Jared, despite himself, laughs.

"Mine, too." 

"Fuck those guys. Fuck those guys, Jared! And Gavin Belson? _Gavin Belson?_ Fuck that -- I mean, and the way he talked to you?"

Richard, red-faced and winded from his tirade, suddenly goes a bit heavy and slack-jawed, like he'd just run a marathon, like someone had come up and punched him hard in the gut.

"I'm sorry," he says as he looks away, grinding the toe of his sneaker hard into the carpet. "I know this is -- well, it wouldn't have happened without me.."

Jared reaches over and takes the champagne out of Richard's loose, resigned grip.

"This seems nice," he ponders, looking at the label. "I think this vineyard isn't too far from here."

An immediate, gentle redirection. A forgiveness Richard feels he hardly deserves.

"It's, well," Richard grits out. "I had something to ask. I dunno. A proposition?"

Jared hums a small nod of assent, nods encouragingly.

"If I do... this. Build Piped Piper, like you said I could..." Richard is so nervous, his throat feels clamped tight, like someone has a hand around it. "I... I want you to be there. To build it with me."

"I'm sorry?"

"Like a partner, you know? Both of us, running it. You're so smart, and well-connected - "

"Gavin Belson said he would make sure I never found gainful employment in the valley again," Jared protests, quickly. But Richard huffs and makes a stuttering but emphatic hand motion, like batting that thought away.

"So you're employed by me and we never sell the company! I don't know - I - I don't know how it works. You do. Which is why I need - um - _want_ you to do this. With me." 

Jared turns and places the champagne on his table, carefully atop a placemat. 

"It's a kind offer," Jared says. "I - I hate to say how much I want to accept."

"Please," Richard interjects, suddenly, looking immediately chagrined to have shown his hand so quickly. He takes a shallow breath and tries to recenter himself.

"We'd... we'd be good together, I think," he corrects, somewhat more eloquently. "A good team. Maybe that's the, um. The relationship we're supposed to have."

Jared takes a tentative step closer, knowing there's nothing he can possibly say to express the thankfulness and excitement and strange, ever-present grief he feels all knotted up inside of him. He grabs Richard's hand in his own and squeezes, once, reassuringly.

"I know you don't want, a, uh, a - " Richard stammers, looking mortified to even bring it up again. "I just want you to know I get it. You don't want - "

"I do," Jared manages. It is so hard, always, to say what he wants. His voice betraying him, going crackly and far-away sounding, as if broadcasted through a cheap radio. He swallows hard, brushes his thumb over the top of Richard's knuckles. "I do want that kind of relationship with you. Romantic." 

"Okay," Richard says, nodding too vigorously. "Okay. Okay."

"I did, even that first night, when we stayed up talking. You were so kind to me. You acted like your life was better for knowing me." 

"It was. It is."

Jared keeps his eyes locked on Richard's hand in his own. Those bitten-up nails, calloused thumbs. He loves them, doesn't want to forget what they feel like under his skin.

"It's just that you were so brave. I didn't know how to... to reconcile with that."

"Jared," Richard insists, his free hand coming up to touch Jared's hip, gently, before pulling away trepidatiously. "You're brave. You're -- fuck, Jared, you really are."

Jared takes Richard's hand and places it back over his hip, where Richard had lingered, then fearfully peeled away.

"Yes," Jared exhales. "Maybe I am."

Richard snaps to look at him. Shocked and elated, anxious to see how this will play out. Searingly, impossibly hopeful.

Jared smiles. There is so much he still has left to learn about Richard. He sometimes wonders if he should feel guilty that he doesn't know the same - hasn't seen him completely, the way that Richard insists he's known Jared for almost as far back as he can remember himself. But in moments like this: watching such huge, wondrous expressions play out across his face. Learning that Richard cries with relief. That his cheeks flush, then his ears. That he touches his mouth when he is overcome, not just when he's nervous, but when he's happy, too. Jared feels a profound luck that he has time to learn, and he will. Everything there is to know about Richard, everything they have the privilege to share for the first time. 

Jared kisses him hungrily. Kissing someone, perhaps for the first time, with the absolute, certain knowledge that they want him. That this is something they've wanted as badly as Jared has. 

Richard's knees buckle. They're suddenly on the carpet, Jared crushed in Richard's arms, careful to keep his knees from jutting into some soft part of Richard's body. Richard hardly seems to notice, his hands finding Jared's hair, the way he knows Jared likes.

So many more years to get this exactly right. Jared kisses down Richard's neck. Unbuttons the top button of his shirt and kisses the newly exposed skin, hearing Richard gasp his name. Jared. A name he suddenly cares so much more about. The name he had when he met Richard.

\-----

Richard hisses as he turns over, shaking out a numb arm, previously caught beneath the weight of his body. Sleeplessness has overtaken him again, here on the precipice of something massive and frightening and unpredictable. 

Beside him, Jared shifts in bed, turning to face him.

"Richard?" he asks, his voice thin and crackly with disuse. "Are you alright?"

"You're a light sleeper," Richard remarks, and Jared smiles. Hides his face in his pillow for a moment and gives a short, embarrassed hum of assent.

"Not always," he admits, still a bit muffled. "I was nervous. Our first time sharing a bed... I didn't want to do something strange. I, ah, I do sometimes."

Richard shifts onto his side, pinning Jared with a bemused look.

"As if I don't know already," Richard drawls, and Jared looks vaguely horrified. Richard lays his hand on Jared's arm. Squeezes once, with an uncharacteristic assuredness. 

"You know," Jared starts, looking somewhat contrite. "I still forget that you know so much. Even when we first met, I believed you but I'd hoped... I'm not sure what I'd hoped. Perhaps that it would fade."

He turns, faces the ceiling. Richard is preoccupied, briefly, by what he can't help but think is a handsome profile, aged so well under such duress, plaintive and sweet even in his drawn up look of disquiet. 

"It doesn't seem fair for you to have to carry it all, too." 

Richard's history is a long and varied slew of instances of not knowing what to say. Who to say it to, or how. When he should bite his tongue and when he should speak up. What protects him and what injures him, what sends him home battered down with a bottle of pills hidden in his backpack, and what deposits him here, in bed with someone he'd ached to meet.

"Um, when I was..." Richard begins, a bit fearfully. "I mean, before I met you? I used to think about you, like, all the time. And I had this, y'know, image of you from when you were a kid that I always came back to. You're um. You're in the woods, and you're alone. There's someone shouting your name but you don't turn around, you're looking up into this tree. It's like. I don't know. Maybe you don't hear them, and if you do, it doesn't matter. You're just looking, until someone pushes you down." 

"A nest," Jared supplies, sort of tonelessly. Caught in a strange, unexpected snare of emotions he can hardly parse. "That's what I was looking at."

"Mmm," Richard nods. "It was... I don't know. I'm sorry, I don't know why I - I don't know if I should've brought this up at all. I just wanted to... I wanted to say..."

Jared lays a hand flat on Richard's chest, assuringly. Just above his heart.

"I wanted to say that I don't think of that, now. When I think about you. I ah," Richard feels his face flush. "I think about you running towards me in that parking lot, that first day. You looked relieved that I showed up. And your shoes. Your stupid shoes were so loud."

Jared's face cracks wide open into a grin, relieved and surprised. He laughs, choked, like the sound gets caught behind his teeth. Richard feels a strange urge to shake him, jostle the noise out of him, open him up. To know more about him, more than the impossible amount he already knows. Being with Jared makes him greedy for all the years they didn't know each other, all the years yet to come.

"Richard, I..." he exhales. He lifts his other hand, wipes briefly at his eyes. "Gosh. That this all is real... I wonder if I'm unconscious or dying, or something. This is an awfully good fantasy." 

"Jared," Richard intones, watching Jared's nose crinkle thoughtfully, bemused. "That's a really weird thing to say."

Jared laughs again this time, fully. Wholly. 

The clock turns to 3:30am. Jared's hand over his heart, the action so close to the familiar and now, somehow, brand new. Some light stirring in the window. Not alone, not lonely. Richard burns this moment into his memory and it lulls him, slowly but assuredly, into a deep, relieved sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from a Lorca poem; an author who, despite this having no real basis in canon, @joycecarolnotes and I feel very deeply that Jared loves.


End file.
